Count of the Marches."

"These words are strange," exclaimed Aude the Fair. "God and all His
saints and angels forbid that I should live when Roland my love is
dead." Thereupon she lost her colour and fell at the emperor's feet;
he thought her fainting, but she was dead. God have mercy on her soul!

The Traitor Put to Death

Too long it would be to tell of the trial of Ganelon the traitor.
Suffice it that he was torn asunder by wild horses, and his name
remains in France a byword for all disloyalty and treachery.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] _See_ "Myths and Legends of the Middle Ages," by H. Guerber.

[13] Marked out for death.

[14] The poetical quotations are from the "Chanson de Roland."

CHAPTER VIII: THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN

Celtic Mysticism

In all Celtic literature there is recognisable a certain spirit which
seems to be innate in the very character of the people, a spirit of
mysticism and acknowledgment of the supernatural. It carries with it a
love of Nature, a delight in beauty, colour and harmony, which is
common to all the Celtic races. But with these characteristics we find
in Ireland a spiritual beauty, a passion of self-sacrifice, unknown in
Wales or Brittany. Hence the early Irish heroes are frequently found
renouncing advantages, worldly honour, and life itself, at the bidding
of some imperative moral impulse. They are the knights-errant of early
European chivalry which was a much deeper and more real inspiration
than the carefully cultivated artificial chivalry of centuries later.
Cuchulain, Diarmuit, Naesi all pay with their lives for their
obedience to the dictates of honour and conscience. And in women, for
whom in those early days sacrifice of self was the only way of
heroism, the surrender even of eternal bliss was only the sublimation
of honour and chivalry; and this was the heroism of the Countess
Cathleen.

The Cathleen Legend

The legend is old, so old that its root has been lost and we know not
who first imagined it; but the idea, the central incident, doubtless
goes back to Druid times, when a woman might well have offered herself
up to the cruel gods to avert their wrath and stay the plagues which
fell upon her people. Under a like impulse Curtius sprang into the
gulf in the Forum, and Decius devoted himself to death to win the
safety of the Roman army. In each case the powers, evil or
beneficent, were supposed to be appeased by the offering of a human
life. When Christia